


The Psychology of Attraction

by disasterwyatt



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, F/M, Pining, Underage Drinking, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:40:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25126372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disasterwyatt/pseuds/disasterwyatt
Summary: It was just Leslie's luck that everything seemed to be going smoothly in her life before a wrench had to be thrown into the works. And Ben Wyatt was the biggest wrench that she'd ever met.
Relationships: Leslie Knope/Ben Wyatt
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	The Psychology of Attraction

Taking this psychology class for extra credit had been a great idea for Leslie, even if she was already juggling several other classes. She was a Political Science major merely trying to broaden her horizons. Psychology was a distinguished subject and it definitely had some ties to her major, so when she saw the opportunity to take it, she took it, as she always does. Ann had tried to talk her down from it, even though she knew her chances of success were slim.

Leslie now realises that the emphasis on how the class ‘ _had_ _been_ a great idea’ was rather poignant now that she stared down at their newest assignment.

_THE PYSCHOLOGY OF ATTRACTION GROUP PROJECT  
\- Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt_

Ben fucking Wyatt. Great. That hard-ass Economics major Ben Wyatt.

It was just her luck that everything seemed to be going smoothly in her life before a wrench had to be thrown into the works. And Ben Wyatt was the biggest wrench that she’d ever met.

She shifts in her seat slightly as she scans the room looking for him. Much to her dismay, she finds the dark haired, scrawny man giving her a smug smirk and a thumbs up, his eyes pointing between her and the assignment sheet. Just the sight of him is enough to send her stomach twisting in fits of rage. Did he really have to be such a sarcastic prick all the time?

She narrows her eyes at him and turns away before she launches herself out of her chair to smack the grin off of his face. Deep breaths, Leslie, deep breaths. The project is due in a few days and, surely, she can pull herself together to feign a smile and complete it without detriment to her grades. Maybe that drama class she took last semester could finally come in handy.

As she delves into her thoughts about the performance arts, the class continues and before she knows it, bundles of students are packing away their laptops and notebooks and starting to leave. She snaps back to reality and decides to confront her problem head on in the form of barging towards Ben.

“Listen, Wyatt. I am going to get this project done with or without you. I don’t need you weighing me down in this class.”

“Okay, _Knope_ , but I’m pretty sure the purpose of this project is that it’s done as a group.” That sardonic grin that she desperately hates creeps over his face as he teases her.

Her eyes stay locked with his, no sign of budging from either of them. “You may think that this is all a joke, but this is my life - this work. It’s _my_ life and I’m not letting you mess this up for me.”

Ben holds his hands up, “Why would I purposely try and ruin a group project in an extra credit class? I mean, seriously, Leslie, don’t you think that I have better things to do than wind you up? Annoying you seems to be easier than I thought if all it takes is my name next to yours on an assignment.” He flashes his dark eyes at her, “I don’t even know why you hate me this much.”

“You’re a jerk, that’s why.” Leslie blurts out, becoming so overwhelmingly frustrated with him that it shows in her white knuckles.

“I’m a jerk?”

“You heard me. You’re a jerk.”

He angles his head down in a wordless attempt to question her once more, but she doesn’t carry on. She just stands opposite him and finds her footing to try to appear taller than she actually is. A seemingly difficult task given she was several inches shorter than him.

“Is that all?”

“That is all, Wyatt.” She promptly turns on her heels, clutching a textbook to her chest and storming out of the room. She won’t turn and look back at him because she already knows that he’s smirking away with his gorgeously mussed hair and fine jawline and she curses herself for thinking those things.

Since she started walking, she didn’t stop once or falter her pace until she was faced with the door to her dorm room. Her sheer anger had fuelled her legs rather than anything else.

Ann’s head turns towards the door as it clicks behind Leslie and they share a pitiful glance.

“Oh no.” Ann breathes, “what’s happened?”

“Ann, we’ve got a Code Ben.”

“It’s still not a code if you say his name.”

Leslie bats her hands at Ann as she paces around the room, “we got paired together for a project in Psych and I’m freaking out because I don’t want to be around him and his face is really pretty and-“

“Slow down, Les.” She sits Leslie down and squeezes her hands, “You never got over that party, huh?”

She looks at Ann with misty eyes. In the first semester, she’d, surprisingly, taken a liking to Ben. They exchanged looks in the library occasionally and he’d made her laugh this one afternoon when he’d stop by her desk and leave post-it notes making fun of the pessimistic librarian. Some of the post-its still live in one of her desk drawers (“Do you think that she forgets to take those tiny glasses off of her nose sometimes?”). There wasn’t much conversation between them at all. They didn’t know each other’s favourite foods or how they take their coffee, but Leslie felt something for him. She couldn’t fill a binder with his interests yet, but she knew she wanted to at some point.

Her and Ann had been invited to a freshman party and she had been so excited. She was going to live the college experience first-hand rather than fantasising about what she had seen in teen movies, where the main character would lock eyes with another at the other side of the room and instantly fall in love. And, maybe, she had thought about Ben being her side character a couple hundred times in the days leading up to the party. And then, that night came around.

With the help of gorgeous Ann, she’d pieced together an outfit that was slightly more promiscuous than she was used to. She wanted to turn heads at this party. In high school she’d only been able to grab the attention of Mark Brendanawicz, who Ann enjoyed describing as “a bag of plain white rice”, and Leslie didn’t fall far from that opinion.

They arrived around 10pm - “fashionably late”, as Ann had called it - and she wasn’t wrong. The party was in full motion. Staggering drunks filled the small college house and blaring music as well as bundles of other reasons for any of their neighbours to call the cops.

And there he was. His back pressed against the wall looking like he was straight out of a cliché teen movie, with a Point Honey Lite in his hand. His drink of choice, she figured. Ann had left her side at some point unbeknown to her, so she searched for him to notice her in his eyes. Sooner than she’d anticipated, he flashed his dark mousy eyes towards her and gave her one of those smirks she had recognised from their library encounters. And the curse of Ben Wyatt began, because she smiled back, and he excitedly gestured for her to come over. So, she did.

It was perfect. It _had been_ perfect. She was living her girl-meets-boy fantasy. The minutes turned to hours as she stood with him. The music was excessively loud, and she could feel his breath against her ear and neck as he leaned closer to speak to her. They shared drinks and laughed together. Occasionally, his hands would find her arms or her shoulders as he steadied himself after drinking one too many. There was something different about his warmth than any other guys she’d been with. Admittedly, it could have been down to the alcohol kicking in because everything appeared dreamier than it should have. The way his eyelashes fluttered when he blinked; how his eyes crinkled when he laughed, how the muscles in his arms flexed and worked as he held his drink to his lips.

“You’re out.” He’d looked down at her empty cup.

“Huh?” She blinked back at him and glanced down, allowing a piece of her hair to fall in front of her face, “oh yeah, it’s no problem.”

He smiled softer than she’d seen that night as he took her hair between his fingers and tucked it behind her ear. Leslie’s breath hitched as their eyes became tied up in one another’s. She wasn’t sure how long they had stood there for in their exchange, but it felt like a lifetime. His lips parted, sucking in a breath, and she reciprocated, slowly leaning in.

“I’ll get you another drink.” His voice abruptly cut through the tension between them, taking the cup from her hand.

Her cheeks burned red, unsure of what to make of their lingering. “Yeah. That’d be great, thanks.” He gave her a small smile and a wink that sent her heart crashing against her ribcage, before he slipped away into the tangled mess of drunk students. The absence of him was crushingly apparent as she fumbled with her hands without a plastic cup to cradle and the lack of heat against her made it clear just how close they had been stood together.

She waited, pressing down on her phone every few minutes to remind herself of how long it had been since he left. Ten minutes went by. A bit of a lousy bartender, she thought.

Twenty minutes went by. I guess he got a tied up, she thought.

Thirty minutes moved into an hour and she was cursing herself under her breath for waiting this long for a guy. She was Leslie Knope, an independent young woman who vowed to not get hung up on guys because they obscured her hopes and dreams too much.

Gritting her teeth, she sent a text to Ann to let her know she’s leaving. She wasn’t going to handle being abandoned like that well at all and knew that it’d be safer to just leave. Besides, Ann was probably having a good time and she couldn’t ruin that for her by crying over an elaborate cliché fantasy of the guy from the library.

She took one more look around the room, the faint glimmer of hope that he’d just gotten a bit too drunk and lost his way back. Nowhere to be seen. Reluctantly, she pushes herself off from the wall and weaves her way through the party, muttering “sorry”’s and “thank you”’s as she bumped into other students and crept past them.

Nearing the front door of the house, she spots familiar tussled dark hair, seemingly messier than she’d previously seen. With surprisingly feminine hands pulling at strands from the back of their head. Surely not? Her feet picked up speed now, leaning higher on her toes to try and see above the sea of swaying heads.

Her gut wrenched, twisting, and turning as the head became more recognisable as him. Ben fucking Wyatt. His mouth preoccupied on someone who wasn’t Leslie. It hurt too much than she’d like to admit. She’d felt a real connection with him, and now she was psyching herself out, telling herself that it was just the alcohol that made him that way towards her. He’d sober up and he’d never want to speak to her again. She was just another girl waiting in a line for his majesty to pay attention to her.

And with that, she had experienced her first college party and her first of many curses against Ben.

“Listen, Les.” Ann slowly coming back into Leslie’s vision, “you’re gonna have to work with him and it’s gonna suck but _you_ are Leslie, god damn, Knope. You can take anything on. I’ve seen you do it so many times. Remember that time Ron had his ex-girlfriend fighting to take him back and somehow you ended up in a drinking competition with her and his mom?”

Leslie grins at the memory, “in the end, it wasn’t his ex that was the most insufferable part, it was the hangover.”

“Exactly!” Ann’s face softens as her best friend begins to come back to life, “you’ve got this. I believe in you.”

Leslie jumps to her feet. “You’re right, Ann, you always are.” She begins shuffling around in her desk for her notebooks. “I’m ten times better than him and that Shauna Malwae-Twerp, or whatever her name is! Although I’m sure she’s a very nice person and she probably just got caught up in his web of dumbassery.”

Ann winces at the weak insult, “yikes. Not one of your best, Les. I mean, “ _twerp_ ”, really?” Both of their eyes meet, and they begin laughing.

“You’re the best, you know that?”

“I’ve been told a few times by one person in particular.”

And with their exchange, and Ann’s confidence in Leslie, she put herself to work promptly. Etching out a plan for the project within thirty minutes. She didn’t need Ben for this. She’s perfectly capable on her own. She’d just hand in her own project but put it under both of their names, and she’d get the full satisfaction of knowing that it was one hundred percent her effort.

She’d prove to herself that she can finally get over that stupid party and the cold, callous gorgeously framed, messy haired guy who left her hanging on while she pined for him.

How would there be any better way to research the topic of attraction?

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I won't abandon this fic like the other one, but also who knows?


End file.
